Reading Neusner (or at least wanting to)

Kevin Edgecomb of Biblicalia , in response to my claim to want to read everything by Neusner, has kindly shared some of his wisdom on how best to approach this prolific scholar. I thought the information would be of general interest so I'm posting them here, along with my response (in which, as always, I manage to work in a reference to Childs).

Kevin:

I'd recommend starting with his Introduction to Rabbinic Literature, which is part of the Anchor Bible Reference Library (or, now, the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library). But I would also have to recommend the book I've been going through, The Theology of the Oral Torah: Revealing the Justice of God. I think it would be a very helpful thing to read in order to experience a kind of selective immersion into the literature guided by someone so very familiar with it. For information on structure, dates, and so on of the Rabbinic literature, you simply have to have Guenter Stemberger's Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (the English translation by Markus Bockmuehl is slightly updated since Stemberger's last German edition, as I recall).

Christian scholars simply don't get the in-depth exposure to the Rabbinic literature that they should have. Just look at the various ways so many (ab)use the word midrash as an example. Christian interaction with the Rabbinic literature, the documents of the Oral Torah, seems always to have been according to a Christian agenda, disallowing the documents to speak for themselves, often at best serving as simply a mine for interesting tidbits stripped of context, used in Christian historical or exegetical programs. The Oral Torah must be understood on its own terms, root and branch, and only then can a fruitful comparison begin to be attempted. This is a project only now in its beginnings.

Me

you are a legend. Thank you so much! I agree with you on the issue of midrash. Brevard Childs (the hero of this blog) shared a flat with him for a while when they were both students and I think Neusner had a big impact on him, even though they were to later challenge each other on the significance of "canon." Childs has often critiqued the way that midrash has been indiscriminately used in Old Testament studies (esp. in his articles "Midrash in the OT" and "Retrospective reading of OT prophets").

Update: Jacob Neusner has contacted me and kindly given me the following advice:

If you want to know the books of mine that I most value, I would say JUDAISM: THE EVIDENCE OF THE MISHNAH, THE TRANSFORMATION OF JIUDAISM: FROM PHILOSOPHY TO RELIGION; and THEOLOGY OF THE ORAL TORAH. These cover my work in literature, history, and theology.

The Rambam on midrashic exegesis

David Guttmann of Believing is Knowing has posted an interesting discussion of the nature of midrash from the Rambam's perspective in his post: The Relationship Between Midrashic Exegesis and the Written Text. Here's an interesting quote by the Rambam:

As regards the four species [the branches of the palm tree, the citron, the myrtle, and the willows of the brook], our Sages gave a reason for their use by way of Midrashim, the method of which is well known to those who understand their discourse. They use the text of the Bible only as a kind of poetical language [for their own ideas], and do not intend thereby to give an interpretation of the text. Accordingly, with regard to the Midrashim, people are divided into two classes. For some think that, the Midrash contains the real explanation of the text, whilst others, finding that it cannot be reconciled with the words quoted, reject and ridicule it. The former struggle and fight to prove and to confirm such interpretations according to their opinion, and to keep them as the real meaning of the text; they consider them in the same light as traditional laws.

Check out the whole thing.

For a related post, see my attempt to distinguish between Christian and Jewish appropriations of the Law of Moses.

Thoughts on the nature of "midrash" and "aggada"

Over at the newly established blog Sefer ha-Bloggadah, a rabbi makes the following succinct denfinition of the nature of midrash and its relation to halakha:

Midrash is the life blood of the halakhic system. I don't think that midrash was made by the sages in order to re-enliven Judaism, I think it was part of the great body of work and was never a separate thing. Today we think of midrash as good post-modernists do, busily locating ourselves here and there in relation to our matrices of self, but the rabbis had no such self-consciousness about that. For the sages, midrash was all of a piece with Torah (in the larger sense of the word). It was true in the finest sense of truth, which is why modern midrash is often so bad - it's written as if it were a novel or a story, when it's really more like a fairy tale, written through archetypes and the power of a lack of details that comes with stories told and retold for generations with plenty of room left for us to fill in ourselves - and to fill ourselves in. Midrash is meant to tell us about values, as opposed to rules. Rules are secondary in the sense that they come afterwards. The rules express the stories told in midrash. The midrash tells us about our relationship with God, Halakha only tells us the recipe - it's as different as remembering the smell of my mother's wheatbread baking, and baking the bread from the recipe she gave me. One is my bones remembering love, and the other is how to make that love live for my son.

I found that very helpful, in particular this bit:

"it's really more like a fairy tale, written through archetypes and the power of a lack of details."

It reminds me of a comment made by Brueggemann in his book The Bible and Postmodern Imagination. I forget the exact words, but he compared midrash to Freud's psycho-analyism, claiming that Freud was more influenced by his Jewish roots then he cared to admit. And for Brueggemann, the comparison was not meant to be derogatory, as he always revels in the "Jewishness" of the "great deconstructors" (Freud, Marx, and Derrida).

A certain Sarah shares the following thoughts on the significance of aggadah:

As a literary sort, I have my own answer as to why Aggadah is valuable: the narrative structure of a parable can compel analysis and inquiry in a way entirely different from a straight-up midrash halakhah or talmudic discussion. Humans express deep truths through narrative art, and whether or not a story really happened has very little bearing on whether it is affective or honest. The traditional project of aggadah is a way to engage in the most deeply human of projects, to insert rabbinic meaning into the canonical text and thus re-enliven it. And by our rereading of these aggadot, inventing and reenvisioning our own interpretations, may we come to engage in all these facets of the aggadic process.

I particularly found the following interesting:

"The traditional project of aggadah is ... to insert rabbinic meaning into the canonical text and thus re-enliven it."

I'd love to understand the logic that binds the the two together - text and tradition - into a meaningful whole. Not that I think the logic is lacking ... but I'd love to see it developed. I'm attempting to think through such issues in relation to the Christian use of a rule of faith, allegory, and a hermeneutic of love. I'll soon be reviewing a book on Biblical authority, a collection of essays on the subject from Jewish and Christian perspectives. I look forward to discovering areas of convergence and divergence.